Oct 4, 2006

Two PhD Students and one Postdoc in COMPUTER SCIENCE

In the Parallel and Distributed Systems (PDS) Group of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science of Delft University of Technology (TUD), and in Computer Systems research cluster at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) of Leiden University, both in the Netherlands, there are job openings for

two PhD Students and one Postdoc in COMPUTER SCIENCE

in the area of Resource Management and Scheduling in GRIDS

in the project GUARanteed Delivery in Grids (GUARD-G), which is funded by NWO in the context of the GLANCE programme on parallel and distributed computing.

DESCRIPTION OF THE RESEARCH
In the vision of grids as a computing utility, similar to the power grid for electricity and the telephone system for voice connections, users should be able to tap their resources and get guaranteed or at least predictable responses. However, in current grids, such guarantees and predictability are all but absent due to the lack of
support for reservations in most local resource managers of the sites making up grids, the variability in the grid workloads, the variability in the available grid resources due to failures and to the background load of local users, and the variability of application runtimes. It is the purpose of this research project to answer the fundamental question to what extent grid schedulers can be built that do give performance guarantees to applications. We will therefore explore novel methods for performance predictions (data-mining techniques, confidence levels, failure inclusion), for application-level and Virtual-Organization-level scheduling (combining malleability and co-allocation in their interface to grid schedulers), and for grid schedulers (overdimensioning, job access control). We will assess these methods with statistical techniques, simulations, implementations in the context of the KOALA grid scheduler developed in Delft, and experimentation in the new DAS3 wide-area computer system which is currently being installed.

The research of PhD student 1 (to be employed by LIACS) will focus on information models for disseminating performance predictions in grids, obtained by statistical data-mining
techniques on performance data.

The research of PhD student 2 (to be employed by TUD) will focus on mechanisms and policies for, and the analysis (by means of simulations and experiments in the DAS3) of predictable application-level and virtual-organization-level schedulers in grids.

The research of the postdoc (to be employed by TUD) will focus on the actual design and implementation of application-level and virtual-organization-level schedulers in the KOALA framework on the DAS3.

RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT
In the PDS group in Delft, currently one staff member, three PhD students, and one postdoc are active in the area of resource management and scheduling in grids, with the research centering around the KOALA grid scheduler. The PDS group participates in the Dutch national VL-e grid project and in the EU Network of Excellence CoreGRID. At LIACS, currently one staff member and one PhD student are active in the area of performance predictions in grids, with the research having resulted in a first version of the Performance Data Miner toolkit for mining performance data. Both TUD and LIACS participate in the DAS3 project.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS PHDs
Applicants must have a Master's degree in computer science with an emphasis on computer systems and performance analysis, and preferably on experimental computer science.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS POSTDOC
Applicants must have a PhD degree in computer science on a subject in the design or performance analysis of distributed computer systems or grids.

EMPLOYMENT CONDITIONS PHDs
These are positions for four years, with salaries according to the standard guidelines of Dutch universities.

EMPLOYMENT CONDITIONS POSTDOC
This is a position for two years, with a salary according to the standard guidelines of Dutch universities.

FURTHER INFORMATION and APPLICATIONS
Further information can be obtained from, and applications for PhD student 2 and for the postdoc can be sent to:

- ir.dr. D.H.J. Epema
Parallel and Distributed Systems Group (PDS)
Delft University of Technology
Delft, the Netherlands
e-mail: d.h.j.epema@tudelft.nl
tel.: +31.15.2783853

Further information can be obtained from, and applications for PhD student 1 can be sent to:

- dr. A.A. Wolters
Leiden Institute for Advanced Computer Science (LIACS)
Leiden University
Leiden, the Netherlands
e-mail: llexx@liacs.nl
tel.: +31.71.5277054


RELATED WEB SITES:
www.pds.ewi.tudelft.nl
www.pds.ewi.tudelft.nl/~epema
www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/koala
www.liacs.nl
www.liacs.nl/~llexx
www.liacs.nl/~hli/pdm
www.cs.vu.nl/das2

[sursa mcfa-ro]